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If you are a heterosexual male, you are ill-advised to attend Columbia University in New York City. The university has established a "sexual misconduct policy" that guarantees the conviction of any accused male, whether innocent or guilty.

Columbia's policy prohibits the accused from exercising his constitutional right to due process. In place of the legal system established by the U.S. Constitution, Columbia resurrected the Star Chamber, in which the accused is tried in absentia, prohibited from cross-examining hostile witnesses and denied representation by an attorney.

And this is just for starters. If the student investigates the charges, lines up witnesses on his behalf or reveals the identity of his accuser to his parents or to an attorney, he is subject to additional punishments for violating Columbia's "rules of secrecy." These rules are designed to prevent his defense and to guarantee his conviction by accusation alone.

It is a well-established fact that women sometimes make false charges out of spite or hurt feelings, or to settle scores. Sometimes women cannot deal with their own promiscuity and pass the blame to someone else with the charge of "date rape."

Recently, several sixth-grade girls, angry over being disciplined by the school's sports coach, concocted a tale that the coach had fondled them in the girl's dressing room. Fortunately for the coach, the police investigated and the girls' story fell apart. The coach was lucky. As often as not, allegations are treated as evidence, and prosecutors use uninvestigated charges to coerce plea bargains.

Some experts believe there are more innocent than guilty people incarcerated on sex-abuse charges. In Wenatchee, Wash., for example, 26 adults were framed on charges of child sex abuse so that Child Protective Services would have results to show for its budget. The testimony against the adults came primarily from two foster children of the detective who fabricated the cases. The children later testified they had been coerced into making the false charges.

Innocent families were broken apart and parents spent years in prison until a brave local pastor, Roby Roberson, stirred up enough public stink that the University of Washington Law School's Innocence Project was able to have the cases reopened and overturned.

A false charge is a serious matter, as it is likely to lead to a coerced plea bargain. As Larry Stratton and I show in our recently published book, "The Tyranny of Good Intentions," false conviction is now rampart in the United States. Experts say there are 200,000 innocent Americans in prison.

The number is high because even defendants protected by due process and an attorney find the financial and emotional stress of a trial prohibitive. Usually they are advised that defending themselves at trial will anger both prosecutor and judge. The former is concerned with achieving a high conviction rate, and the latter with a cleared court docket. A trial interferes with both goals. Consequently, a jury trial means the prosecutor throws the book at the defendant and the judge hands down the maximum sentence.

In 95 percent of the cases, defendants permit their attorneys to negotiate a plea to a lesser offense in order to stay on the good side of the prosecutor and judge.

At Columbia, where the accused has neither due process nor a lawyer, false conviction is certain. It is even more the case now that radical feminists have succeeded in making some women feel that they have a moral obligation to hate men with the same intensity that Nazis felt for Jews and communists for the bourgeoisie.

On American campuses today, men are scapegoated in courses in literature, history, sociology, psychology and "women's studies." The atmosphere is loaded against the heterosexual male especially if he is white. Young women, pressured by feminists to "take a stand" against their oppressor, feel even less restraint than the sixth-graders who targeted an innocent coach for destruction.

University of Pennsylvania professor Alan Charles Kors, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, wrote to Columbia's president. Mr. Kors pointed out that under Columbia's version of the Nuremberg Laws, a male on the verge of graduation who has the misfortune to break up with his girlfriend could be expelled on the basis of her allegation that he committed "date rape" during his freshman year.

Columbia once had a law faculty. What happened to it? Why are there no protests at the Nazification of student judicial procedures at Columbia University?

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